response to irresistible pressures. It is but a short step from this inevitabilism
to the assertion that thereisnoalternative for states and societies but to adapt
and restructure their policies, structures and practices. For the scholars
writing at the peak of post-war growth, the most significant transition was
considered to be that from traditional to industrial society. This shift
represented the underlying movement in all state-societies as they responded
to external pressures. Talcott Parsons’ systems-centred social theory sought to
understand the adaptation of

rediscover our original impulses;
and the contemporary University takes a neutral position with regard
to this. It serves our nature. It encourages us to conform to that alleged
natural condition.
Such conformism is precisely the kind of quietism that neoliberal
politics needs, as a means of ensuring that ‘thereisnoalternative’ to
the current – ‘natural’ – conditions of wealth inequality. When the
University becomes complicit with the total financialization and the
privatization of all human interests – especially that of knowledge
– then we enter a crisis in which its

the year.
Trump’s language is constructed squarely upon Schmitt’s ‘state of
exception’, where the law is built upon the condition of its own suspension, and the sovereign may enact that suspension under extraordinary
circumstances. The unapologetic transparency of Trump’s falsehoods is
unusual, but in principal his polemic follows the same ‘thereisnoalternative’ logic that has been referenced elsewhere in this book through
the speeches of Hilary Benn and David Cameron. By dramatising a
broader threat, the discourse is divorced from contextual interrogation
and

Thanking her for a ‘magically
perceptive letter’, Anderson (who used the I-Ching quite often)
developed her analysis saying that he had ‘always believed
instinctively in the necessity of waiting for the forces of life to nourish
one before it is possible to undertake any new work of any ambition’.
One must wait until ‘time has brought one inescapably round to the
point where thereisnoalternative but to undertake a new

of mind over mind
133
The teachers: 1. Gazi Al-Tibi 2. Husni Natour, are in favor of Faisal Natour.
The two teachers: 1. Ahmad Anqar, 2. ‘Ab Al-Hamid Farouga, think that thereisnoalternative to Maki or at least to a democratic list.
When the meeting ended, Salih left accompanied by two teachers: 1. Ahmad
‘Ali Dussoqi, 2. ‘Ab Al-Fatah Musa
I think they are good friends of Salih.
(Q. Abd Al-A, 22 December 1961)6
To stop this grassroots initiative of establishing an Arab list – which took place
in 1961–62 – the surveillance and control agencies took various

have no alternative but
to take military action’. Nye reported to London that K.M. Pannikar, the
Indian Ambassador to China, seemed to accept these statements by the
Chinese as bona fide and ‘clearly regards the situation as very grave. He
has suggested that Nehru should send a personal message to the Chinese
Government and Bajpai has prepared a draft which has not yet been seen
by the Prime Minister’. Whilst Bajpai agreed that Pannikar was a ‘somewhat volatile person’ he felt, nevertheless, ‘that thereisnoalternative but
to accept the views of the man on the

newsroom
can control scandal reporting once it has gathered momentum.
Perhaps the mechanisms of the hounding – which are, after all,
acknowledged – are not good, but unfortunately the course of events
cannot be halted. The process is beyond the control of individual
actors. When I later listened to the interviews, the lines of argumentation made me think of the political term TINA, the acronym for
the expression ‘ThereIsNoAlternative’. The following pages will
investigate the significance of this fatalistic conviction in detail.
Undignified behaviour and a lack of

Margaret Thatcher return to power for her second, genuinely revolutionary period in office. The album documents, then, that moment when the tide
of history shifted in favour of the forces of neoliberalism. While some of the
songs on Combat Rock showcase a trademark righteous belligerence, the
overall tone of the album is rather closer to political acquiescence. Listening
to the likes of ‘Ghetto Defendant’ or ‘Straight to Hell’, there is a mood of
abjection that suggests that thereisnoalternative to an ascendant political
order that would only compound the injustices

to do so with dogmatic
determination, or, as one might say today, in accordance with the dictate
that ‘thereisnoalternative’. According to the interpretation offered in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment, humanity’s earliest known trauma is not so much
the individual’s deprivation of the love of the mother as much as it is the species’ fear of the otherness of nature, and human helplessness before nature’s
whimsical unpredictability.20 Each in their own way, then, first-​generation crit­
ical theorists maintain that the conquest of external nature through scientific

founded on courage, heroism or valour. Any Norwegian publisher would have done the same in the Rushdie affair. Thereisnoalternative. Any alternative would undermine our whole tradition as guarantors of freedom of expression, a principle which Norwegian publishers have stood by for decades. 42
The response from the literary and creative community was generally favourable to Rushdie – concerned as it was to defend the freedoms of writers and artists. Frances d’Souza and Carmel Bedford founded the International Committee for the Defence of